


interludes: it won't be long 'til i'm coming home

by apollos



Series: The Waves Against the Rock [3]
Category: South Park
Genre: M/M, Vignette
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-03
Updated: 2016-09-16
Packaged: 2018-05-17 23:37:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 2,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5889502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apollos/pseuds/apollos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Small moments in long months.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. HOME

**Author's Note:**

> and now, dearest, we return, across the crackling sea  
> like two blind birds to their wall,  
> to their nest in a distant spring:
> 
> because love cannot always fly without resting,  
> our lives return to the wall, to the rocks of the sea:  
> our kisses head back home where they belong. 
> 
> pablo neruda, "love, we're going home now"

i. 　　

In the quiet of early dawn, Stan looks at Kyle. Kyle is sleeping in the passenger’s seat, his head against the window, his mouth ajar. Drool collects on his chin. While Stan looks at him, Kyle jerks as if he is aware he is being observed, grunts softly but defiantly, then settles back in. Stan is so suddenly and viciously seized by love that he must turn away and focus back on the road. They are in the desert and the sun is rising, painting the sky in baby shades, and all the animals are secure inside their burrows, sleeping.

Two days ago they were ankle-deep in the ocean, professing their love, making a blood pact with the shattered pieces of their hearts. That night they’d had sex in the motel room, their tears collecting with their semen on the sheets, leaving little marks wherever they went. Stan hasn’t stopped crying since, really, his eyes wet. He wants to touch Kyle, doesn’t want to wake him.

ii. 　　

Kyle was back in Washington and sitting on his bed in his dorm room. His senior year, he’d finally ascertained a single, and it was just him in the room, staring out the window. It was raining hard, so hard it looked like streaks of gray flying at him, and he puts his eyes right up to it, let himself flinch as the wind pushed the rain towards his face. 　　

New prescriptions lined his windowsill. Retreating from the rain, he picked one up, read his name over and over again. Kyle Emmanuel Broflovski. As boys when they exchanged middle names, Stan revealed that he had a great-uncle on his mother’s side named Emmanuel, and Kyle had felt a pull deep in his stomach, the hand of God on his back pushing him towards that boy. 　　

He felt that now, that low pull, and put his head back to the window. Stan was not in Washington, and Kyle hated this place.

iii. 　　

They are born of the mountains, these boys. They spent their childhood huddled together nestled between peaks, their little town a stifling recluse. They fled together, first diving into self-made forts, then flinging themselves across the continent. They are standing on the precipice of adulthood yet they are immovable god-children, they cannot be separated. For all its worth they share the same beating heart. A strike against one is a strike against other; they are always in pain, they would not have it any other way. For now the winter has not come and the spring is breaking across the mountains. They are back home, though home is not a place that can be visited physically, home is the space they have carved into each other. Not for long but for always, they are home.


	2. conversation

i. 　　

It became a ritual: seven o’clock, after dinner, settling into bed, laptop on his stomach, Kyle’s face filling the screen, until they fell asleep. It was for these moments that Stan lived, that he passed his days for, always with the same hope in his heart: that Kyle would be okay. He always held his breath in the first moments of conversation as he felt out Kyle’s mood, blind and groping in the dark, and it was always a small miracle with he found the light switch and saw that Kyle was okay. 　　

He didn’t think of the times when Kyle were not. It made their illumination all that more painful, but there were sacrifices one had to make, Stan thought. That was one of them.

ii. 　　

The worst days are when it rains so heavily they cancel class, leaving Kyle to fester in the darkness, cold and counting down the hours until the evening. Lucky number seven. Kyle twirls the prescriptions around on the shelf, listens to the rattling of the pills, and wills himself not to slip under. The rain is so inviting when he leans his head against the window. 　　

At seven sharp his laptop lights up and he hurries to it, a moth drawn to the light. “Look how hard it’s raining,” he says before Stan’s even fully visible. “They canceled class and I’m miserable.” Yet he snatches the words back as soon as they leave his mouth, for even through the screen Stan’s warmth is palpable.

iii. 　　

Sheila Broflovski will see Ike off to school on Wednesday mornings then settle at her desk in the study she shares with her husband to start the daily paperwork. Afterwards she will go about cleaning the house. When the clock strikes twelve she will know it is time to call Kyle, his class schedule printed and pasted to the refrigerator, a midweek lunch time call to his mother scheduled in. She will make the same lunch date joke every time she calls. She will ask her son how he’s doing; she will remind him to eat and to take his pills. She will cluck when he expresses annoyance. She will remind him that she and his father love him and are proud of him. Sometimes, they will talk for longer; sometimes, for shorter. On the days where it is shorter, she will wander around the house for a little while afterwards, until she finds herself standing in front of Kyle’s bedroom door. She will remember where she is. She will shake her head twice and then she will continue on with her day.


	3. spillage

i.

On a somber Friday morning in early March, it rains on top of a fresh snowfall. Whether it is the rain or the brief rise in temperatures that washes the snow away, Stan doesn't know; all he knows is that he awakes to the sight of grass, trampled down by ample snowfall, a dead and dull green and brown color. From his window he takes a picture, texts it to Kyle. _It rains here too_ , he says. _I love you. I miss you._

Then he pulls a flannel from his floor, beats it against the empty air for a few times to rid it of wrinkles, pulls it over his head and buttons a raincoat on top of it. He shoves his feet into a pair of boots, already laced, no socks. He forgets his keys and has to double back for them when he is halfway down the stairs. And though Kyle has not yet responded, he texts him for a fourth time: _I am a mess without you._

ii.

 _It rains here too. I love you. I miss you. I am a mess without you._ Kyle bit down on his hand to stop the tears but they kept coming, running down his face in little rivers, carving their paths.

Kyle wasn’t sure why he was crying. It wasn’t raining today in Washington, though it was overcast, and he was in a public place, his favorite study lounge. Nobody was around, but that didn’t stop his shame. He took his hand from his mouth and put his head on his claimed desk instead, tasting salt and copper. He had bitten his hand so hard it had started bleeding.

It was love, maybe, that made him do this, that split his body open and let everything spill so severely. It was love, it was lack of sleep, it was a break in the clouds that let sunshine slam through the windows and onto his back, a violent and vicious slap of heat. Kyle picked his head up. Kyle texted back.

_I love you I miss you I need you too. It’s not raining here._

iii.

The rain will reach South Park in the form of snow, heaping inches overnight. Randy Marsh will wake in the early morning to use the bathroom and he will when he sees it outside the window, for he would have to spend his morning shoveling a pathway for himself and his wife to go to work. A Friday, no less, the weekend on the horizon, now foggy from everything ahead of him. He will scratch at his stomach, tuck himself back into his underwear, return to bed.

Sharon will stir as he folds himself underneath the blankets. “Go back to sleep,” he will grumble, turning his back to her. “It snowed,” he will add, clearer, agitated.

Before he fell asleep he will find himself wondering if it had snowed where Stan was, too, and he will remind himself to call his son. But these thoughts will evaporate as his body makes its way towards slumber, and come morning his only concerns would surround the snow and his workday, Stan forgotten in their wake.


	4. need

i.

Stan was awake, watching old Broncos videos on YouTube and eating dry Applejacks out of a box, when he got the call. His heart skipped a beat—did somebody die? It was three in the morning, a Wednesday night. His heart did not settle down when he saw the name on the phone. _Kyle_. The picture, from California, a blurry shot of Kyle with his head half-turned away and a smile on his face.

“God! Stan! I just can’t do this anymore!” Kyle sobbed into the phone. It took Stan a minute to piece even this much together.

“What’s wrong?” Stan whispered, not wanting to wake his roommate. He sent a look towards him and then left his room, going out to stand by the tall windows in the hallway, looking out into the darkness.

“I _miss_ you. I _hate_ it here.”

“Shh, shh.”

ii.

It is raining, and Kyle is asleep, his phone still open to a conversation behind him. Stan is rambling incessantly, describing Bronco plays in deep detail, football drifting into Kyle’s dreams. It is spring; as far as Kyle is concerned, it has been spring for the past four years he’s been here. A long wait, an eternal pregnancy, and though Kyle is excited about his metaphorical and metaphysical baby, he’s pretty sure it’s going to be stillborn, that it’s already dead inside of him.

iii.

Ike Broflovski will pause in the middle of his practice at center ice, staring up at the ceiling. He will realize he has never fully taken in just how tall the ceilings of ice hockey rinks are, or just how much the coolness of the ice slinks up his legs, wraps around his groin, hugs his torso. He will be skated into by the back of a teammate.

“Broffo!” the teammate will say.

“Sorry,” Ike will say, and he will shake his head, returning to running suicides.

Afterwards, after he’s dressed out and driving home, he’ll remember his brother, and send him a text to check up on him. The response will come immediately: _Doing well_. Ike will sigh, will turn up the radio, and will turn his mind back to hockey.


	5. secondclause

i.

It’s a bad day. Stan receives a paper back that he’s gotten a C on, from some bullshit 100 level English class he’s just taking for requirements. He gets a rejection from a graduate school in the mail. There’s no good food at the commons and he’s forced to pay out of pocket for a sandwich from a pub down the street, and while he’s there he orders a beer, drinking it on the way back, relishing cold beer and crisp air in combination.

It didn’t used to be this way. Stan used to be a straight-A student, a dedicated hard worker after the academic slums of high school. It was hard to manage; it meant sacrificing a lot. But lately—

But lately things have been bad.

ii.

For once, Kyle was excited to call Stan on Skype. He picked at his nails while the accosting, bubbly ringtone filled the air. He had done his hair; there were no bags under his eyes. He wanted to see Stan, not for some desperate attempt at stability, but because he had _good news_ to report.

Stan was a little late to the Skype call, but that was okay, because he could have been sleeping, or something. He looked tired on Kyle’s screen.

“I’m in a _great_ mood,” Kyle exclaims, before they can exchange hellos.

“Really? Dude, that’s great!”

But Stan still looked so tired.

iii.

“I’m _worried_ about him,” Sharon will say to Randy over morning breakfast.

Randy will look up from his newspaper and coffee, still in his underwear and socks. “Don’t worry about it, Sharon. He’s probably got senioritis.”

“I will worry. I’m his mother.” Sharon will sigh, taking her own cup of coffee and sitting across from her husband. “I don’t want to say it to him, you know, but I think it’s Kyle.”

“I _knew_ that boy would be trouble,” Randy will grumble.

Sharon will let the subject fall. She will fret all day, texting Stan, who will insist that he’s just tired, that he’s ready to graduate. But Sharon will think about how he’s been applying to graduate schools—surely he isn’t sick of school just yet? Her bright son. She will text him, _just keep your head in the game the best you can! Xoxo._

But she will not stop worrying.


	6. sleepy

i.

Stan’s bedtime was unfixed, fluid. Some nights he crashed at nine; some nights he stayed up until four with a 10:00 class in the morning. Coffee was his friend, and he found that as he was nearing the end of his senior year his body didn’t require as much sleep as it did at the beginning of the year.  
The quiet solitude of the night was as welcome as the promising thrums of the morning. Walking to the commons for an early breakfast and watching the sun rise was as pleasurable as looking outside his window at two A.M. at a fresh snow, untouched by footprints. Virgin and pure.

ii.

Things Kyle knows: his bipolar disorder has identifiable triggers for both manic and depressive episodes, and that a major trigger for him is lack of sleep or too much sleep.

Things Kyle doesn’t put into practice: that.

So many a night he finds himself awake at four A.M., having just woken up or just went to sleep, crying into his hands under a scalding hot shower or cleaning his room from top to bottom, music blaring in headphones in his ears. So many times he goes to class after forty-eight hours of no sleep, taking utterly unintelligent notes, saying shit he isn’t even cognizant of, would never be cognizant of. So many times he sleeps for twenty-four hours straight, a whole day dropping out of his life just like that.

Kyle has lost the concept of what a bedtime even is.

iii.

A drained cup of sleepy time tea and a dog-eared book on the bedside table accompanied by a lamp recently shut off, Gerald will go to bed every night at 10 P.M. He will say goodnight to his wife, kiss her tenderly on her lips. He will count the things he is grateful for in his life: Sheila, his steady job, his nice house, his successful son, and that his other son had not yet committed suicide. Not in that order; if he were to save the suicide thing for last, he would fall asleep anxious and sad.

Coffee in a brewing pot and his wife cooking breakfast downstairs, Gerald will wake every morning at 7 A.M. Nine hours of sleep—a marvel for people his age! He will brag about it to his coworkers, who will in turn brag about how little sleep they had the night before. How silly, Gerald will think. How utterly silly.

Scowling and with tear marks on her face, Gerald will listen to his wife report his older son’s mental status to him every Wednesday. He will pay particular attention to his son’s sleeping habits; he will refrain from calling him immediately, lecturing him on the importance of a proper sleeping schedules. Gerald will reflect: some things he will never understand about Kyle, no matter how hard he tries.


End file.
